Intel Looks Ahead to the Wrist, the Ear and the Eye

Intel’s new management duo remains under pressure to get its chips into more smartphones and tablets. But the new leaders are already setting sights on gadgets that they expect to sell in still-higher numbers.

Brian Krzanich, who took the CEO job in May, said in his first meeting with reporters Friday that he is a fan of the high-tech Google glasses that have become an icon for the wearable-device category. But he predicted an explosion of other devices associated with three main parts of the body, all of which will need processing power and generate a mind-boggling flow of data.

“There’s wrist, ear and eye,” Krzanich said, predicting activity in smart watches, earbuds and glasses–some of them acting independently and some of them operating in a tethered model by communication to other nearby devices, like smartphones.

Intel plans to make use of its advanced manufacturing processes to create smaller, more power-efficient chips than the competition to try to gain a foothold in wearable devices before competitors–not play catchup as it has in smartphones and tablets.

Krzanich made it sound like the company is pretty far along in attracting customers, though he didn’t name any.

“I think you’ll start to see stuff with our silicon toward the end of the year, and then into next year,” Krzanich said.

The conversation lasted more than an hour with Krzanich, a former manufacturing expert at Intel, and Renee James, who was head of Intel’s software efforts before being named the company’s president. They touched on a range of topics, showing a determination to move Intel forward faster.

Among the key messages:

–Intel has no plans for the chips it sells itself to deviate from its familiar x86 technology and make use of circuit designs licensed from ARM Holdings, the current standard in most smartphones and tablets.

But the story could be different as far as Intel’s new service to manufacture chips for other companies. If a great customer in the laptop or mobile device market said “‘look, we’d really love you to build our ARM-based product,’ we’d consider it,” Krzanich said. “It depends on how strategic they are.”

–Intel researchers have been quietly working on more radical product ideas, including those based on entirely new chip architectures that have nothing to do with x86 or ARM.

“These are multi-year efforts,” James said. “They’ve been going on for five to seven years.”

–Intel won’t protect the flagship Core product chip line from potential cannibalization from its own less-expensive Atom chips, which are better for the pocket-sized devices.

–Intel believes the video-streaming business it has been working on has built a great set-top box and software, but is being realistic about the challenges associated with licensing video content.

“We are trying to evaluate what do we do now, and how do we best utilize this technology—and what is our business model,” Krzanich said.

–Intel is hard-core about services, but not competing with cloud-style companies in a conventional way.

James led Intel’s ill-fated Web hosting business during the Internet bubble, and has no desire to re-enter today’s version of that fray against the likes of Amazon Web services. “That moment has passed,” she said.

But there are lots of other kinds of services to consider, and ways to sell chips and software to service companies. James promised to be very aggressive in adding capabilities such as the hit program Hadoop, for which Intel is already selling its own version.

Many of the specifics about Intel’s new directions and specific product plans will become clearer at its next developer forum at the end of the summer, James said.

One thing is clear now: Krzanich and James are pretty candid about Intel’s past failings, and not only the need to do new things and move faster, but also drop some current efforts.

“We are asking our people to tell us what they are going to stop doing,” James said.